This site hopefully can provide some vehicle by which I can comment, complain, and once in a while praise the state of religion in this country and around the world from a liberal protestant perspective.

Monday, July 28, 2003

A staple arguement against gay and lesbian inclusion in the Episcopal Church is that since Lambeth, the gathering of the world wide Anglican church, came out against gay and lesbians the US church must accept their verdict on this issue. This is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what the role of Lambeth and its resolutions play in the life of the church. Check out the newest piece on Goliard Compleat's blog.

One could see God as the "power in relation" as theologian Carter Heyward puts it. Martin Buber writes along such lines when he claims that God is to be found in the intersection of I-Thou relationships. An I-Thou relationship is marked by a particularily deep level of communion with another, treating the other as a person and not a thing or an instrument for some other end. Henry Nelson Wieman called this process, creative interchange.

The idea behind creative interchange is that we develop, we grow, good and meaning is increased, in relationships with each other. And that such relationships are marked by the integration of the other's perspective into our own, so that the other somehow constitutes something of who we are. So that the meaningful appreciable world we experience is larger. And our ability to discern emergent goods in the world is more sensitive. And the act of this intercommunication creates the possibility of a deeper form of community. Something not happening in the life of many churches these days.